


metronome

by waterfront



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: F/M, Post Season 3, and neither is she, how Kate begins to heal, not with words but by actions, omelets are important, seth isn't a good cook
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-13 02:10:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10504266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterfront/pseuds/waterfront
Summary: Kate wakes up to nightmares. She needs a distraction. She returns to her old ways and somehow, they don't feel like hers any more. What does normalcy taste like after you've been possessed? Unsurprisingly, Seth doesn't have the answers.(Might become a small three part series!)





	

A cold grasp around her ankle.

A pressure on her chest.

Sticky blood rolling down her throat.

The hand wrestles for control of her knee, her thigh.

Screaming. So much screaming.

The pressure worsens; her lungs constrict; something’s in her mouth – something overwhelming.

The scream sounds like Scott—

A gun clicks—

Her wrists burn— the skin is itchy and cracked—

There’s dust and fire and unimaginable pain— she wants to scream but there’s something thick in her throat— she’s drowning – no she’s suffocating—

Kate sits bolt upright, hacking and coughing, almost retching a thick knot of red hair out of her mouth. Her hands trembling, she peels away strands of her own hair back from her wet cheek. She feels the hair slither up the back of her throat and she gags.

She can finally breathe again. The wet hair strands now stick to her shoulder like soggy hands.

Her skull is on fire.

Her hands clench into the soft cotton blue sheets. There’s a vine of damp blankets wrapped around her left leg and she kicks herself free, leaving her bed bare. She sits, in total darkness, in the center of a king-sized bed, in a culebra compound, in the middle of nowhere Texas, and she waits for her heart to stop racing.

A green light blinks to her right and she looks, sees neon numbers wink the witching hour back at her and understands that she won’t sleep again until the sun crests over the flat Texan horizon.

Her red hair, Amaru’s red hair, tickles the center of her back, like a ghost tapping her, daring her to turn around. _Look at me._

_Face me._

_I’m still here._

_I always will be._

Her thighs shiver. Her knees quake. This nightmare was particularly bad. Her scalp itches terribly.

She wipes her face of tears, sweat and a grime she can’t scrub clean and thinks of the boys in their rooms on either side, how they look worried when they think she can’t see them. How they exchange glances behind her back. How they don’t know if she’s still the little girl they held hostage in a motel, or something else entirely. Something not human.

Richie pushes. Richie prods. Richie wants to help her, just like Scott and Freddie and Maggie and Dakota.

But Richie wasn’t there to hear her confession.

She wants to get through this nightmare on her own, almost out of spite, almost out of anger, almost out of fear – that she can’t. Kate leaps out of bed, her skin rustling against the sheets, and rushes to the bathroom. She splashes 3AM water on her face and her mouth is still dry. She looks into the mirror, into her sallow eyes, set back deep in her head and her hands start to tremble again. Her hair looks like ripped tendrils, fingers, bony claws gripping her skin, her shoulders, her neck.

She lifts her shirt and checks her stomach. The bullet wounds were never there.

The white tiled floor of her private bathroom is cold.

She thinks she hears laughing and she almost breaks the mirror. The world is silent around her. No cars out this far.

Her hair flutters in her deep, sharp breaths. She can’t take it anymore.

Kate rips open the white drawer next to her and grabs a pair of black scissors.

Her wrists itch again and she thinks of a church and waking up to the strangest angel she’d ever seen.

Kate grabs a length of that terrible red hair, meets her own fiery gaze in the mirror, and cuts.

* * *

She smells bacon and wonders how long it’s been since she’s had bacon. A real homemade breakfast. She hears it crack and sizzle as she pads down to the compound’s kitchen at three in the morning.

Her head is light. Free. She turns her head to find the source of the cracking and her hair barely brushes her shoulder. She’s slipped Scott’s grey sweatshirt over her sleeping camisole, her soft cotton shirts riding on her hips. When her mother was ill, everyone always kept talking about how important food was. As she got sicker, after church, people would drop off lasagnas, casseroles, even whole chickens. The dutiful daughter accepted them graciously and put them away and went back to what she could do to help: make sandwiches. It was methodical. It was step-by-step-by-step. It was mindless but kept her hands busy. Kept them from shaking. She isn’t hungry but she aims to make a plateful of sandwiches because what else there was to do? In grief, everybody needed to eat.

And apparently, so did Seth Gecko.

At three in the morning.

His hair is feathered up in the back, dark green sweatpants hovering over his heavy feet, and a long grey tank looping down to his middle. His back to her, his heavy elbow jerks back and forth as he prods a yellow goo in a frying pan.

               “What are you doing here?” She asks, immediately cracking open the stainless steel refrigerator.

               “Wha’s it look like I’m doing? ‘M making a fucking omelet.” He responds without any bite behind his language. “Why are you up?”

               “Can’t sleep.”

               “Makes two of us.” He grumbles and adds more salt, or pepper; she isn’t sure. She turns to the counter, her arms full of mustard, mayonnaise, cheese and bread and turkey. She nudges aside his cutting board, full of discarded red pepper, and he reaches over and pulls it fully out of her way.

Kate tucks a short, lighter strand of hair behind her ear and reaches into the bread bag.

They are silent, except for the sizzle and pop coming from the stove.

Out of the corner of her eye, she watches his glaze flicker to her – once, twice – he blinks.

               “Your hair.” Seth says, his voice gruff with sleep. She turns to him and meets his eyes. The brown there is muddle, bleary. He still isn’t awake fully, but for some reason, he won’t embrace sleep. Or sleep won’t embrace him. Seth looks soft, unprepared. Not like the man who threatened to shoot her in the knee to prevent her suicide. Not like the man who just saved the world. The criminal who saved the world.

She smiles at the spatula in his hand, the blurred look in his eyes, and yes, even his sweatpants.

               “Yeah. It just kind of . . . happened.” Kate touches a strand, curled up by her jaw, and she shrugs. “The red isn’t coming out. I needed something . . . different.”

Seth nods, like he understands. He tries, but Kate never tells him enough to let him really understand. She’s not sure why she doesn’t tell him. She tells no one. Richie pokes. Richie prods. Seth looks at her like he wants to ask a question, but can’t remember how language works. Like he’s choking on his tongue.

Seth turns back to the omelet and flips it. He shrugs now. “It’s a good change.”

Her hands are shaking again when she picks up the knife to start spreading the mustard. She counts down from ten with every stroke and she momentarily forgets he’s there. She thinks she hears screams again so she has to put down the knife because it’s trembling.

Her shoulders relax. The screaming fades. She picks up the knife again.

10 – 9 – 8 – 7 –

She comes back to her own head and she feels a half-gaze on her. Like he did back when they were bustling through motels, through gas stations and banks. She was always in the corner of his eyes, a haunting he could never escape. Like a burden he was wary of.

Kate turns over her shoulder and makes him look at her in the eyes. That tension in his back loosens, and he shrugs again.

               “It’s a good change,” he repeats.

It’s almost frustrating that he doesn’t ask. He doesn’t try to understand more than anything she’s given him. He doesn’t push on her, but he’s not pulling away. He’s just . . . stationary, when it comes to her.

They finish cooking in silence.

She rolls up the bread bag and Seth turns off the gas. He slides the hulks of bell peppers into the trash can she nudges towards him. He washes the knife off and hands it back to her, and she slides it into the drawer. They step around each other, eyes on the floor, and Kate puts away the mustard, mayonnaise, cheese and bread and turkey. Seth reaches up into a stainless steel cabinet and takes out two throw-away plates.

Kate drops her sandwich onto the paper plate and stares at it. She doesn’t want a sandwich. But she’s no longer shaking. Her hair isn’t in her face.

               “Want this omelet?” He asks her. Kate turns and he’s giving his meal the same disgusted glare. As though food is foreign to the both of them and they’ve just lived on air for their entire lives. Kate thrusts her plate forward. He looks up.

               “Only if you eat my sandwich.”

He grabs another plastic fork out of the same metal cabinet and hands it to her. She jumps up onto the counter, the plate warm where his omelet sits. He joins her and their feet dangle at the knees. She cuts up a slice and he takes a bite.

It’s near four now and the compound is still quiet.

Now she hears him chew. Methodical. His beard is thin. Still bristly.

Scott told her he didn’t know how to help because he never knew when the spikes were going to come out. When and what made her bristle. Like an animal trapped.

She wasn’t trapped in her own body any longer.

               “I’s good, yeah?” Seth indicates the omelet on her plate, mouth full of food, and by the jut of his jaw. He’s more awake now, but there’s some part of him that wishes he wasn’t. Kate wonders why he was so inclined to make omelets in the middle of the night – what was his tragedy to overcome?

She nods in response to his question.

He is content, sitting next to her in the half-darkness of early morning. Eating. Like it was routine.

She decided to be content with him and she leans back, her feet swaying. She cuts another bite and takes it.

Now she wants to poke. To prod. To get that look of breath-taking desperation he sent her at the mouth of hell. When he accepted he’d lose her permanently as penance – and she might have loved him.

She might have loved a criminal. She might have loved a junkie. Or it was just grief, successional grief, and Kate Fuller really did die at the bottom of a well and she was now just another harbinger parading around in her corpse.

She glances at Seth, who was wiping away a bit of stray mustard from his lip. He wouldn’t like it if she said that out loud; it was morbid. Scott got scared when she got morbid. Richie went quiet. She had yet to be morbid in front of Seth, but she knew what he did when he was scared.

He kicked her out of cars and abandoned her to the wolves.

Their shoulders brush and Seth clears his throat. He slides down from the counter, crumbs left on his plate. He moves, towards the trashcan. Still not prodding.

               “Don’t you want to ask me?”

He pauses and looks over his shoulder. “Ask you? About what?”

She drops the plastic plate next to her and licks her bottom lip. She pulls her knees to her chest and shrugs. She feels a simmer of anger and it’s strange. She has the muscle memory to be confrontational with Seth, but not the reason. Muscle memory is safe. It’s from before. When it was just the two of them. “Anything. I don’t know. Everyone else has questions.”

               “I ain’t everyone. You know that.” He dusts his hands free of crumbs and leans against the far counter. Crosses his arms. He still has the crux of his forearm bandaged, where he found the vein, when it mattered the most. She looks away.

               “Do you _want_ to talk?” He continues. A challenge.

She swallows and pulls her brother’s sweatshirt over her hands.

               “Everyone’s been on your ass the minute we got back here.” He’s talking at her. Not to the side. Not to the corner of her eye. He hadn’t spoken to her directly since they saved the world. “Figured you needed space. Could come to . . . could talk about it when you wanted.”

He’s trying that thing where he’s dropped up against a smooth surface, trying to look relaxed and at ease, but she knows he’s tense.

There was a moment, here and there, on the dusty road, that he’d smile and she smile back. Uneasy grins from one unlikely pair to another. An exchange between – no, not friends – not strangers –

Partners.

She wonders what he thought when she said that.

Everyone had questions for her. And she had questions for him. Only him.

               “I don’t know if I want to talk about it. I don’t know if I . . . can.” She breathes out and her hair flutters back. “I’m sorry.”

He nods. “Do you think you can go back to sleep?”

She shakes her head. He nods again. Motions to the refrigerator.

               “Think we got some ham in there. Maybe a head of lettuce or two. Mags tries to keep the hot pockets out of reach.”

Kate nods again and stands. She turns back to take the bread down from the top shelf – and hears the door pop open. She pauses –

He’s digging out the mustard, mayonnaise, cheese and bread and turkey – with ham, this time.

He lets the ingredients fall out of his arms and again she tucks her hair behind her ears, but there’s not much to hide behind anymore.

               “Since you’re gonna be down here, churning out sandwiches like it’s your goddamn job,” he grins down at her and she experiences another muscle memory. Her stomach clenches and her toes curl. The road she took with him doesn’t feel real. It’s not a real memory. But her body, her skin, she aches with the weight of it. _Did he ever ache for her too?_

Kate snatches that thought out of her brain and hurls it out a window. He was still grinning like he knew it would win her over. “Want some company?”

Kate stops spooning out the mayonnaise. She wants to smile because it sounds like a beginning. It sounds like a fresh start. She wonders how many more of those she can survive. Seth swallows, grin fading, his gaze drops and he puts down the two slices of bread.

His voice is thick and he’s grinding up courage from somewhere down in his gut.

               “Kate, I—,”

She wants to hear his apology. She wants to know why he left her on the side of the road and then quite literally fought back hell to get her home.

She reaches out and touches his heavy knuckles resting on the counter. He flattens his hand against the granite and she, slowly, tucks her tiny fingers in between the spaces in his. She barely has a grip when he closes his hand again around her fingers.

They stand there, for a moment, her hand wrapped around his, his shoulders hunched against the world outside.

There is time for talking later. There always would be.

For now, she wants routine. Steady. Monotony.

Kate releases his hand and goes back to smearing her bread. After a moment, he joins her and then, the only sound for miles is the scrape of their knives against the bread.

When dawn breaks, there’s a stack of sandwiches sitting on a plate in the kitchen.

She tells him good night in front of her doorway. Blue sleep has crept into his eyes, his hair, and she knows he’ll be out the moment his head touches the pillow. He half-smiles again and says good night back. He watches her open her door and wander inside.

If she lets herself believe, allows herself to start over, allows _him_ to start over, then maybe, just maybe–

she thinks he lingers.

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who is a garbage human! Yo soy! 
> 
> I'm still on the job hunt but I just straight up had to write this. Once I actually find a more permanent position, I won't have to spend all my free time freaking out, so hopefully I can get back into writing - which means more SethKate. If you've sent in a prompt, I swear to Kisa I'm going to get to them - yes, even the Christmas one. Thanks for sticking with me, and if you want to reach out on tumblr, I promise I will respond!


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